I know this is not a very technical question, but it’s for all technical people, that’s why I ask it here. Here is my question:
Can someone help me understand the current and future of learning LISP? One of my papers in university uses LISP for a project (it’s a big project – may be two semester long), and I am not able to decide whether I should put lots of effort into learning LISP if there is no future in LISP, or should I just learn as much as needed for the assignments and do some other project which doesn’t need any LISP. I know a little bit of basic LISP. Please help me.
If you have a real interest in software development, you should learn Lisp and other programming languages.
Ruby, Python and Perl are distant relatives of Lisp. A bit nearer is Javascript – which is basically a primitive Lisp with a strange non-programmable syntax.
The core of Scheme is relatively clean and quite powerful. Teaches basic concepts.
Common Lisp is a powerful language which has all kinds of ‘exotic’ extensions. You can experience multi-paradigm programming in a single language.
Clojure is a newer Lisp which breaks with the Lisp tradition in multiple ways, but offers an interesting blend of a functional language and concurrency.
All three Lisp dialects offer meta-linguistic abstraction capabilities that few languages offer in such an elegant way (Prolog would be another interesting language that has similar capabilities).
Experiencing that code is data and data can be code will change your view on programming forever.